Debian Weekly News - December 19th, 2000

Welcome to a special edition of Debian Weekly News. We had planned
to skip this week for a vacation, but Debian never sleeps...

Testing has entered the main Debian archive. Testing is a new branch
of Debian to complement stable and unstable. New uploads enter
unstable, and if no bad bugs are found in two weeks time, flow into testing.
Thus, testing is always in an "essentially releasable state".
Now that package pools exist, it was not too
hard to make
testing a part of the main archive. Woody has now been designated as
testing and populated with packages from stable, with updates that the code
behind testing thinks is safe (so if you have "woody" in sources.list,
you'll probably run into
this
problem). Testing is sure to have far-ranging implications throughout
Debian, from package release frequency and everyday development, to porting
and security fixes, to release timing and management. Interesting times lie
ahead.

Now that woody == testing, how's it doing? Release manager Anthony
Towns made a
"state of the woody address". Important upgrades like glibc 2.2,
X 4.0.1, and perl 5.6 are not in woody/testing yet, but they soon may be.
Unsurprisingly, both the number of packages and the number of open bugs have
increased since potato was released. Anthony's main concern is that the new
debian-installer project is not ready yet, and the old boot floppies need
several months of work to be usable for woody. A related thread discussed
other goals
for woody Putting all this together, Anthony projects a freeze in May,
with a release in June -- though he cautions: "Presumably it'll end up
getting extended since nothing ever goes to plan."

Fixing Debian's buggy vote counting methods has been the topic of
discussion on debian-vote for several weeks. The few people who have been
involved in the discussion all agree that there are
some
ambiguities in the constitution
that, if triggered, could make a vote unresolvable. A
proposed
fix for the problems turned out to have an
obscure
bug of its own. Since this discussion is becoming increasingly arcane
and off-topic for debian-vote and increasingly on-topic for the
Election Methods mailing list,
a joint committee
is forming, made up of interested people from both lists. They will
discuss "all the problems with decision-making process [...] in the
current constitution", and develop a proposal about how to fix them.
Of course the final decision about adopting the proposal will be made by
Debian.